American schools have taught reading by using a variety of methods. Popular methods used in public schools over the last forty five years have taught children to associate words with pictures or other visual clues, thus replacing the age-old phonics (letter sounds) instruction used before that time. These methods known as "Look-Say," and "Sight" methods depend in large part on the person's capacity to memorize words. For students, this means committing more words to memory until the task becomes overwhelming. When the Whole Language approach is used, students learn a bit of phonics, but seem to miss some of the essential parts of it. Without understanding those missed portions of phonics instruction, the child experiences difficulty reading as he or she advances in age and in grade and is required to add more words to an ever increasing vocabulary.
Many children who read poorly are now labeled "dyslexic," a term applied to people who experience specific problems with reading and language. Many "dyslexic" children are placed in special education classes with an understanding on their part that in some way they are "learning disabled," less than normal, defective. When otherwise normal people perceive of themselves as defective or mentally impaired in reading ability, often they experience emotional and psychological pain. They feel ashamed. The perception that they themselves have internal deficits that make learning to read a problem can translate into lowered self esteem. With lowered self esteem, it is common for children, adolescents and adults to experience problems in relationships with peers, authority figures, subordinates, and practically all other people. They may become angry with themselves but direct that anger outward toward others. They may develop a dislike for the school experience and begin acting out their frustration. Low self esteem can be seen in behavior that ranges from clowning, to indifference with an "I don't care" attitude about everything, to irritability sometimes called "a short fuse," paranoia, or to outright rage. Often that acting out causes peers, teachers and administrators to also consider them as abnormal people and not simply children with unmet learning needs. The problem that begins in first grade worsens by fourth or fifth grade and often becomes almost unmanageable during seventh and eighth grades. If they manage to continue into high school, these students may become even more disruptive, be poor achievers academically, and drop out before graduation.
Some students invent survival strategies and manage to graduate and even go to college. Nevertheless, the reading problems plague them throughout their career preparation and may dictate which fields of study they enter. Such students may understandably exclude fields of study that require learning great numbers of new, long and difficult words, as may be found in the sciences or in legal or medical professions. Some become driven as over achievers in other fields. The list of behavioral and emotional responses and consequences is enormous. Despite achievements or lack of achievements, most if not all will invent reading avoidance tactics to camouflage the real problem of poor reading skills and internally continue to feel inadequate. Feelings of inadequacy that produce low self esteem work against development of good mental health for the individual and are likely to be manifested in serious social problems affecting all.
The problem that originated with popular methods of reading becomes further complicated when parents realize that the child has developed emotional and/or behavioral problems and seek help from a psychotherapist or similar professional. The therapist may identify the child's emotional and behavioral problems with appropriate terminology and commence treating those problems. A similar approach may be used with adults who experience relationship problems. Assessment of reading disabilities may or may not "figure into" the intervention for either child or adult. If a referral for educational tutoring is made, it places the client right back in the system where the problem originated, a situation that could make matters worse. The therapist identifies the educational portion of the problem as being outside the range of therapeutic intervention, and the educator identifies the psychological problems as barriers to the person's ability to engage in the learning process and as being outside the range of educational intervention. This leaves the reading problem unresolved and the related emotional and psychological problems under treated and worsening. The symptoms of the problem may receive attention from the therapist but if the cause is not identified and eradicated, the problem of low self esteem will continue to manifest itself in other ways. As these adolescents and adults have children, they find themselves incapable of helping those children develop reading skills; very likely the cycle repeats.
This invention of method and materials gives the therapist and parents the tools for correcting the problem that had previously been relegated to "No man's land." For the people who have been psychologically damaged by reading instructional methods, the two problems must be dealt with as one otherwise the lack of attention to one or the other undermines the progress of restorative efforts. This invention provides motivation and instruction in learning the code needed for development of phonetic reading skills and is not based on word memorization abilities It simultaneously repairs some of the psychological damage done to the student who has suffered lowering of self esteem because of being unable to read well after participating in traditional and alternative reading instructional methods. It offers a practical tool with wide application that can reduce the cost of education and mental health treatment of children and adults, and reduce personal and societal problems resulting from impaired reading skills.